Sunday, March 13, 2005

"[Blockbuster drugs] have one thing in common besides their high sales: they are usually treatments for very common lifelong conditions."The conditions are not so serious that they are lethal, but they do not go away either. Sometimes they are little more than annoyances, like hay fever."Consequently, large numbers of people may take drugs for these conditions for years, and that is why the markets are so large."

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

"It seems obvious to most people that software designs do not go through the same rigorous engineering as hardware designs. However, if we consider source code as design, we see that software designers actually do a considerable amount of validating and refining their designs. Software designers do not call it engineering, however, we call it testing and debugging. Most people do not consider testing and debugging as real "engineering"; certainly not in the software business. The reason has more to do with the refusal of the software industry to accept code as design than with any real engineering difference."